


I'll see you when I fall asleep

by steveandbucky



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Dreaming, Flashbacks, Insomnia, M/M, Natasha Romanov Knows Everything, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Sad, Steve Rogers Feels, Visions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-24
Updated: 2015-08-24
Packaged: 2018-04-17 02:35:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4648989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steveandbucky/pseuds/steveandbucky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve can't sleep - Wanda lends a silent helping hand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll see you when I fall asleep

**Author's Note:**

> Steve-centric fic with subtle hints of stevebucky (& even subtler of clintatasha bc im bitter like that)

 

Natasha finds him on the rooftop, a place that has become a regular hang out spot for the two of them. Sleep doesn’t come easy for neither of them these days; the early hours of the morning find them curled up on two armchairs they’d dragged up there in the first month, waiting for the sun to rise.

“In a way it’s kind of nice,” she tells Steve one night.

“In no way is it nice.” he argues.

She laughs and takes a sip of her beer, finishing it off and setting the bottle on the floor. She shifts and adjusts her blanket so it covers her toes, shivering in the early October breeze.

“I used to run.” He says after a long moment of silence. “Every morning when the sun came up.” Their eyes meet and Steve smiles weakly. “Wasn’t sure if I was running after something or away from it.”

“Maybe it was a bit of both,” she says quietly. Her gaze falls over the empty bottles on the floor, and then out towards the full moon hanging in the sky above their mansion.

Steve shrugs, having nothing to say. Another long moment of silence passes before she looks over to him.

“Did he know?” she murmurs. “Did you ever tell him?”

Steve’s jaw clenches in a reflexive response. Natasha is looking at him with soft, sympathetic eyes, and he doesn’t see that in her often. His shoulders sag as he breathes out a heavy sigh. “No, I never did.”

It was there, it was always there between them, and he knew he loved Bucky, he was sure of his love for Bucky with the same conviction that he knew the sun would rise every day. “We weren’t – it wasn’t like that…. But it was an almost something,” he says with a rueful smile.

She nods, looks away. Instinctively, her hand touches the necklace around her neck, as a validation that it’s still there where it should be. “I think I might know a little bit about that.”

Steve pretends he doesn’t see the movement. “Yeah?” he asks in a whisper.  
Natasha lets out a deep breath. “I’m going to bed,” she says as she gets up, and puts a hand to his shoulder before she heads to her bedroom.

Steve is left alone with his thoughts, and his watch reads past four in the morning, so he too decides to leave the rooftop and collapses into bed with another long sigh.

That night he dreams of home, of Brooklyn and Bucky like they were before the war, and he feels an ache deep inside him, one that he’s felt many times since he’d returned to the world of the living. The feeling of missing something that belongs to him, that has been ripped away from him and he can’t ever have it back. _Home._

_Bucky is laughing, his eyes crinkling in the corners. “Steve, you fool,” he says as he slings an arm around his smaller friend. “Hey, it could have been worse. She could have actually said yes,”_

_Steve laughs but he’s still annoyed so he elbows Bucky in the ribs as hard as he can._

_“Ow,” Bucky lets go of him and rubs his side. “You punk,”_

It’s not a dream. It’s too real to be a dream. He watches the scene unfold in front of him and feels that familiar deep ache like a knife twisting in his stomach.

He wakes up to find that the sun is already up.

He finds Natasha in the kitchen with Wanda with a coffee mug in each of their hands, scrolling through the online newspapers headlines on a tablet.

“’Morning,” Natasha says chirpily.

He manages a grunt in response.

“Sleep well, Captain?”

Steve pauses with his hand on the fridge door. He turns to look at Wanda, and her smile tells him she knows, seconds before his brain catches up and realises why she knows.

“Yeah,” he mumbles. He can’t quite manage a smile but Wanda nods her understanding.

Later, in the evening, he finds her in the garden out back and mumbles a quiet ‘thank you’. She smiles but doesn’t meet his eye. “Anytime,” she says.

Steve forgoes the rooftop and falls into bed with heavy eyelids. He dreams of Brooklyn, the way it is now in the modern world, and of the two of them as they are now, laughing and curling in on each other as they walk hand in hand, leaving their worries in a trail behind them.

He wakes up with an honest, happy smile on his face.

 


End file.
